Cruel, unusual service for U.S. soldiers during WWII

In 1944, Rollins Edwards was a 22-year-old Army recruit serving at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana. While World War II raged in theaters across the world, the Pentagon was using the chemical weapon mustard gas on its own soldiers in secret experiments, both abroad and at home.

Without an explanation of what mustard gas was, Edwards was directed by his superiors to repeatedly expose his entire body to the toxic gas. The tests also divided service members by race, with Rollins recently telling National Public Radio, “They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins.”

Edwards suffered severe burns and other debilitating, lifelong injuries. He was offered no specific follow-up care after of the experiments and was sworn to secrecy after threats from superior officers.

Edwards was not alone — 60,000 service members were subjected to these experiments. At least several thousand men received the same type of full-body exposure as Edwards.

The United States declassified the experiments in 1993, letting the public know for the first time what these soldiers endured. And Congress instructed the Department of Veterans Affairs to identify and locate the victims of the experiments and inform them that they were eligible for compensation.

Edwards filed for his benefits in 1993. He finally received the compensation due to him in December 1999. But many other service members who faced the horror of these experiments have been confronted by bureaucratic inaction and incompetence instead.

The VA made only minimal attempts to contact these individuals and, more troubling, often denied their claims of harm.

The horrible reality is that it’s too late for the vast majority of these service members — most of these men who served and fought bravely for our country are no longer alive.

But some are alive, and many have received nothing in the aftermath of the terrible and seemingly pointless sacrifice they were forced to endure more than 70 years ago.

My staff and I have met with officials from the VA and the Pentagon to try to understand why so few of these men have received any kind of care or compensation. Following those meetings, I asked for documents from the VA and a database of service records from the Pentagon so that I could better understand where our government had fallen short and how we could reach out to the men who still need our help.

Shockingly, both the VA and the Pentagon have been largely unresponsive. As I told Defense Secretary Ash Carter at a recent hearing, “I don’t understand why this is so hard. Why is everyone not opening up these records and doing everything we can to get the word to these people?”

I’ll keep bringing pressure to bear on both agencies to provide this critical information.

But in the meantime, we must act. Using every publicly available list of victims we could find, I’ve instructed my staff to reach out, one-by-one, to each service member to open casework files for them and advocate with the VA to get them the benefits they’ve earned through their sacrifice.

I’m also encouraging any service member who was a part of these experiments or their loved ones to go to a web page I’ve set up (mccaskill.senate.gov/mustard-gas-tests) and answer some basic questions so that we can advocate on their behalf.

More than 70 years ago, some of our bravest Americans were subjected to horrific experiments against their will, and their government has all but turned its back on them. It’s time we collectively commit to honoring their sacrifice before it’s too late.

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the daughter of a World War II veteran.